• Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger *** (of 4)

    Burkhard Bilger is a German-American, accomplished author and writer for the New Yorker, and the right age to have a grandfather who was a Nazi. His grandfather was old enough during the war not to be a soldier, so during the war Nazi officials placed him in charge of an occupied French town in Alsace. After the war, Grandpa was imprisoned for war crimes and then released after being acquitted in trial. Burkhard digs deep in hopes of learning how much of a Nazi his grandfather really was.

    What Fatherland does best is contextualize the actions of individuals. He explains why his grandfather joined the Nazi party. It was expedient, but not a requirement. The book describes the daily interactions taking place between the Nazi-emplaced Mayor (Grandpa) and citizens in an occupied French village. Business proceeds, but eyes and ears are everywhere. Negotiations can be verbal, tactical, or violent and Bilger’s Grandfather had to navigate between Nazi orders from above and an innate sense of humanity (atypical of many Nazis.)

    Without making excuses for any Nazi behaviors or policies, Burkhard Bilger asks whether there might be a dividing line between horrible Nazis and really-not-so-bad-Nazis. It is a well asked question.

  • Fire Weather by John Vaillant **** (of 4)

    Just as every year is now the hottest on record, so too the number and intensity of wildfires across the planet break annual records for temperature, acreage burned, and never-before-seen fire behavior. A warming climate, low atmospheric humidity, pre-dried forests, and human habitations in previously uninhabited ecosystems are all tinder waiting for an inevitable spark.

    What makes this book so insightful is its focus on fires in 2016 that demolished the city of Fort McMurry in Alberta, Canada. Fort McMurry is the home to Canada’s bitumen deposits of tar sands, the worlds least efficient and, after coal, most carbon intensive fuel. In essence, the oil extraction industry warmed the planet enough that it set itself afire.

    Further, human habitations, now interspersed in forested and tree-lined communities everywhere, are constructed with fuel for fires. House fires can be contained if a single home goes up, but are uncontrollable when a wall of intense heat flows toward a neighborhood. Homes are fabricated with kiln-dried wood and filled with wooden furniture and cabinetry. The number of household items made of oil-based synthetic products is surprising: vinyl siding, carpets, sofas, pillows, clothing, electronics. To a raging fire, it is all just fuel. Then add the propane tank for the outdoor grill, the gas tank for the SUV, and cans of sprays and paints in the basement and homes tend to explode before a fire even reaches them.

    Interspersed with the minute by minute account of the explosive growth of the Fort McMurry fire is a detailed, and unequivocal litany of warning about human induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The evidence and scientific proof has been around for more than 100 years, albeit in some marginal locations. Still, by the 1950s and definitely by the 1980s, there was widespread agreement that burning fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. I was explaining this in lectures already in 1987.

    What kind of evil is embodied in corporations and individuals whose internal memos acknowledge the repercussions continued fossil fuel extraction would have on the livability of our planet? Favoring profit or people, Vaillant leaves no doubt that they paid obfuscators to confuse the public and protect their profits.

    This book, a National Book Award finalist, should be required reading, but it should also be read only on the first floor. At the end when the reader jumps out the window she can live to recommend the book to someone else.

  • Free by Lea Ypi *** (of 4)

    Lea Ypi is now a distinguished professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. She wanted to describe for readers what life in her native Albania, the last “purely” communist country aside from North Korea, was like prior to its conversion to a more democratic society. Ypi (pronounced Ooopie) begins each chapter with a vignette from her childhood and finishes each with an analysis of political forces at stake. We learn the rules of queuing for rationed commodities; the artistic and status value of owning a smuggled coke can; how the tensions of career paths assigned by the state, rather than chosen, wore down her parents’ marriage; and how something called an unalterable “biography” was deterministic for navigating society.

    It is not clear why each story has to be seen through the eyes of young girl, but I think Ypi is doing more than personalizing her experience for readers. She is writing more than a memoir. What she is saying, is that when the State decides what you can do for a living, what you can purchase in a store, or where you can live it infantilizes all of its citizens.

    For much of the book, Ypi overlooks heinous actions of Albania’s secret police. That overshadowing is made up for by her critique of capitalism. Albanians were not paralyzed by too much choice, never had to face the difficulty of desiring more than they needed, so no one, she claims, ever really felt poor. Health care and education were available to all. In fact, societal divisions caused by class, sex, or race were theoretically abolished by the communist state. By comparison the inequality meted out by the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of capitalism feels hopelessly unjust. The rich get richer and the poor seem never to break free.

    In the end, Ypi’s comparison of Marxism and capitalism criticizes both systems. Under Marxism, man dominates his fellow man. Under capitalism, it’s the other way around.

  • Cheap Land Colorado by Tim Conover ** (of 4)

    There is a part of the dry flatlands of Colorado called the San Luis Valley where five acres of land can be purchased for a couple of thousand dollars. There is no electrical grid, sewerage, and in most places no running water. Nevertheless, the appeal of owning one’s own land acts as an outdoor lamp to moths for Americans who are poor, drug-addicted, paroled, angry, deeply religious, paranoid, anti-government conspiracists, or mentally unstable in complicated ways. Ted Conover is an immersion journalist who purchases a piece of property and a trailer and braves the ferocious dogs that seem to surround each shack or trailer and makes an effort to talk to his neighbors.

    At his best, Conover humanizes a cadre of people who have stepped outside the normal confines of civilization. We learn that there is a great deal of pain, destitution, and untreated mental disease in an otherwise prosperous country. What he does less well is research and history. He tried to explain how real estate developers came to own the land they are selling, but I still don’t get it. He has part of a chapter about murders that have happened in the area for the last 100 years, but I’m not sure why we should care. Most troubling is the absence of any real arc to his story or take away message. Conover goes back and forth from his east coast university job to his trailer in Colorado and records interviews, but there isn’t any evident beginning, middle, or end to the book.

    To his credit, Conover is bringing to light how challenging life can be in America, but the frustrations and misery of the off-gridders doesn’t seem especially unique to Colorado. His subjects can be found just as readily in Philadelphia, Sacramento, or probably within ten blocks of his job at NYU.

  • Goodbye, Eastern Europe *** (of 4)

    It is an enormous undertaking to try and explain the people, cultures, and kaleidoscopic national identities of a region as large as Eastern Europe. Jacob Mikanowski does as good a job as one person can do in a single volume. Beginning in prehistory, Mikanowski really settles in with the establishments of the overlapping and interdigitated religions of the region: pagans, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. For centuries communities and traditions have often lived alongside one another united by common languages while empires have redefined their borders.

    The Austro-Hungarians, the Hapsburgs, the Soviets, Poles, Yugoslavians, and Prussians in various iterations and sizes have laid claim to Roma settlements, shtetls, Byzantine churchyards, and people who might speak Ukrainian, a dialect of Hungarian, Yiddish, or who think of themselves as Albanian Muslims, Montenegrans, Latvians, Croats, or Romanians, but in any given century find themselves living in a country not the same as the one their parents or grandparents knew.

    In most parts of Eastern Europe, regions and cultures have not undergone the historical nation-making impositions claimed by Western Europe that made countries like Germany, France, and Spain what they are. (That being said, tribal fractionation is still alive and divisive in Great Britain, Belgium, Catalonia, Basque country, and so on.) This history of an enormous region is at once comprehensive and necessarily superficial, focusing on geopolitical machinations and the lives of men. Women and the daily lives of peasants are largely absent, because to include them would be another book, another volume. Still, having a spotlight swept around Eastern Europe is exceptionally informative.

  • Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin ** (of 4)

    Toobin can be a captivating writer; he is one of the greats at uncovering the backstories of a variety of criminals and noteworthy trials: OJ Simpson, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump, the Gore vs. Bush election, Bill Clinton, and the make-up of the Supreme Court.

    Which is why it is surprising that he missed the mark with this book. No question that Timothy McVeigh was one of America’s most successful and by Toobin’s accounting, one of its first domestic terrorists. On April 19, 1995 he drove a truck bomb to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up, killing 168 people including 19 children in the building’s daycare facility.

    He was motivated by rightwing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and the conspiracy theories that circulated amongst politicians. Shock jocks and their supporters pedaled lies about government overreach and suggested in rather stark terms that only patriots and other defenders of the second amendment could save the nation. Toobin draws a direct and clear line from McVeigh to the treasonous revolutionaries that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Men and women who attacked the Capitol were also spurred forward by a new generation of right-wing conspiracists and a new generation of communication, social media, but recycled the same dogmas that led to McVeigh.

    It is an important arrow pointing at how dangerously thin the line is between election deniers, second amendment fanatics, Newtown skeptics (Alex Jones acolytes) and their proclivity toward violence.

    But Toobin makes two mistakes. The first is subtle. He implies that McVeigh was the first right-winger of his ilk, overlooking McCarthyism, Silver Shirts, American Nazis, the KKK, and White Supremacists some of whom have been around since colonists considered Native Americans subhumans. The line leading to January 6 is twisty, but continuous, and a lot longer than Toobin is willing to admit. In a single toss away line he points to the Tulsa Race massacre of 1921 as having killed as many as died in Oklahoma.

    The first half of the book is a thorough biography of Timothy McVeigh from birth to bombing with thorough detailing of the years, months, days, and minutes leading up to the bombing. Then, because he cannot resist describing courtroom proceedings, Toobin repeats everything we have already learned as it was presented by prosecuting and defending attorneys. One recounting, or half the book, would have been enough.

  • Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen Guelzo *** (of 4)

    Tens of thousands of books have been written about the Civil War, and thousands have covered one of the most significant battles of the conflict: the invasion of Gettysburg by General Lee and his confederate rebels and its defense by the Army of the Potomac. I read this book in preparation for an insider’s tour of the battlefield I was given by Dr. Carol Reardon.

    Guelzo’s take is to zoom in on the experience of less well-known officers beneath the famous Generals Lee and Meade and then to zoom in further to the experience of individual soldiers.

    General Lee’s objective was to invade the north and by so doing create enough carnage and dissent among anti-war Northeners that he could draw them to the negotiating table. Lee’s counterpart, General McClellan of the Army of the Potomac, was widely popular among soldiers and politicians, but on a field of battle so cautious that he avoided every opportunity to fight. Just three days before the face-to-face meeting at a crossroads in Pennsylvania, following McClellan’s dismissal, George Meade was appointed General of the American army.

    The three days of battle in the heat of July turned on a hundred small calculations, luck, ineptitude, and fortunate timing. The outcome was so closely contested that a single successful artillery barrage or an attack begun five minutes earlier or later could have altered the outcome.

    On the battlefield, Guelzo makes us feel the challenge of moving roughly a hundred thousand men on each side across scores of miles of countryside to take up position. Then he explains what a soldier had to endure, marching day and night without rest, proper nutrition, or kit before being dumped directly into battle. Guelzo also explains that guns were far from accurate and that compensation for an inability to aim accurately or see an enemy through a dense fog of gunsmoke was to fire a hailstorm of bullets. Trees were stripped of leaves and branches. Artillery blasted away. Men were torn to shreds in an age before the discovery of germs or antiseptics; horses were broken and discarded like so many tanks.

    Reading between the lines, the political adeptness of Lincoln is exceptional in holding together his coalition. The primary goal of the northern states was to preserve the union, not necessarily abolish slavery. Furthermore, many Americans in the north objected far more to Lincoln’s policies of warfare, were opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation, and were more interested in continuing their economic partnerships with southern producers (read slave owners) than in paying taxes to fund a war.

    Unfortunately, Guelzo clearly does not like General Meade and fails to give him credit for expertly deploying his forces to fend off General Lee’s attack.

    Above, the field across which Pickett led the famous last charge of the rebellious south at Gettysburg.

  • How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

    Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who can be identified from a distance as “other” in an otherwise liberal setting, not all is well.

    Walker’s essays are short, often funny, and almost always leave you with an underlying feeling of anxiety. When Walker’s child is accused of being “stinky” in elementary school, Walker wonders if the accusation borne of home-taught racism, and does he already need to explain to his son what he is about to experience, or just a schoolyard taunt? When Walker shops at his neighborhood Whole Foods, white women instinctively seal up their purses, pull them from their shopping carts, and draw them close to their bodies. When his child suffers a seizure, and then another, and he sits in a panic in the ER for an eternity, while others appear to be treated with greater speed, is it because his is the only Black family waiting, because by rules of triage, there really isn’t much to worry about?

    This book was nominated for the National Book Award for good reason. The author makes us tighten up our shoulders with every page and we have to recognize that the fear he has engendered in us, accompanies him all the time.

  • Draft No. 4 by John McPhee *** (of 4)

    McPhee is one of the preeminent nonfiction craftsmen of the last half century. As a staff writer for The New Yorker his longform essays have culminated in 31 books, four Pulitzer nominations, and a Pulitzer Prize. He has summarized his decades of experience as writer, and writing instructor at Princeton, in Draft No. 4, a book that is richer than chocolate mousse: every word is at once carefully calculated and placed with seeming effortlessness so that it is best digested in small servings.

    McPhee shares universal truths such as the observation that all writers are either insecure about their writing or, falling into a second category, find that having other people read their work makes them feel insecure. You are not a writer, says McPhee, unless you experience bloc and that bloc is best overcome by typing at the top of the page, “Dear Mom, here is what I am working on now…” Assembling a first draft is painful, but second and third drafts are easier. Fourth drafts are a necessity at a bare minimum.

    It is hard to say if non-writers will get as much from this book as those who have agonized over putting together a compelling essay. For readers, rather than writers, I recommend any of his 30 other books.

  • Deep South by Paul Theroux **** (of 4)

    This is Paul Theroux’s only travel book wherein the act of traveling is intentionally easy. Unlike his other books – taking the railroad across Siberia, traveling from Cairo to Cape Town by public transport – in this one, he heads from his home in New England to the Black Belt of the southern U.S. in his personal car. He returns several times, responding to the siren, “Y’all come back, now.”

    The driving is easy but the landscape is just as poor, but less tended to by national and international aid organizations, as anyplace he has seen in Africa, and Theroux has spent years in rural Africa. What emerges from a book written in the early 2000-teens is that Black people in the southern United States continue to face economic segregation that is so severe as to leave families living in tar paper shacks, on degraded farmland, facing an inability to get loans or federal assistance more than a century after Reconstruction.

    Making the book even more unique is Theroux’s discourse on other travel writers and especially to famous southern writers, most notably William Faulkner. It’s like taking a roadtrip with a particularly informative English professor, albeit a driver who keeps asking how it is possible that former President Clinton’s multi-billion dollar foundation (and others like it) can provide aid to villages in Africa, but won’t pay attention to desperate hollers in his Arkansas backyard or impoverished cotton farmers with leaking roofs in Mississippi.